Anonymous Rex (4 page)

No one knows, then, why he chose to delve into another population pool—perhaps he had grown tired of our kind, weary of the egg-laying and endless waiting for a crack in the shell. It is true that he was childless. Perhaps he wanted to sharpen his carnal skills on a different breed of creature. It is true that he was ambitious. Perhaps, as many are inclined to believe, he had developed Dressler’s Syndrome, that he thought of himself as truly human and simply couldn’t help but be tempted by the pleasures of mammalian flesh. Or maybe he just thought the chicks were cute. Whatever the case, Raymond McBride had broken cardinal rule number one, established since
Homo habilis
first dragged themselves onto the scene: It is absolutely forbidden to mate with a human.

But now he’s dead, murdered in his office almost a full year ago, so what the hell’s the use in fining the poor guy?

A knock at the door saves me any more questions about McBride or Council meetings of which I no longer have any knowledge. Teitelbaum coughs out a “What?” and Sally pokes her head into the office. She’s a mousy little thing, really. Pointed nose, stringy hair, wan complexion. If I didn’t know she was a human—no scent, never seen her at any of the dino haunts throughout the city—I’d peg her as a Compy in two seconds flat.

“London on line three,” she squeaks. Sally’s a great gal, a real hoot to talk to, but in Teitelbaum’s presence she shrinks up like a dry sponge.

“Gatwick Gift Shoppe?” asks Teitelbaum, his hands jittering in childlike anticipation. If he weren’t so disgusting, I might find it endearing.

“They found the Tower of London toothpicks you wanted.” Sally shoots me a quick smile, turns, hops, and flits out of the room, mission accomplished. A surgical strike into the boss’s domain: in—out—six seconds! Good for her. I should be so lucky.

Teitelbaum breathes heavily, a ragged paper-shredding growl that trails off into the wheeze of a deflating balloon, and grabs clumsily at his desk phone. “I want two gross,” he says, “and send ’em overnight.” End of conversation. I’m sure the Brit on the other end is astounded with American courtesy.

An abrupt change in tone now as Teitelbaum moves into business mode. Extending a teensy costumed arm across the expanse of his desk, grunting with the meager exertion, Teitelbaum grabs at a thin file folder. “Now I ain’t saying you’re gonna be looking for the Hope Diamond or nothing,” he says, and flips the folder into my arms. “Just a little legwork, nothing you can’t handle. It ain’t much, but it pays.”

I scan the pages. “Fire investigation?”

“Nightclub in the Valley, lit up Wednesday morning. One of Burke’s places.”

“Burke?” I ask.

“Donovan Burke. The club owner. Hell, don’t you read the magazines, Rubio?”

I shake my head, unwilling to explain that nowadays the price of a single magazine would surely affix me below poverty level once and for all.

“Burke’s a big skiddoo on the nightclub scene,” Teitelbaum explains. “Had celebrities in and outta that place every day, mostly dinos, a couple of human clientele. Had the place insured up the wazoo, and now they’re gonna have to pay off about two million in fire damages. Insurance company wants us to check it out, make sure Burke didn’t blow the place ’cause business was lousy.”

“Was it?”

“Was it what?”

“Lousy.”

“Christ, Rubio,” says Teitelbaum, “how the hell should I know? You’re the PI here.”

“Anybody in the club at the time?”

“Why don’t you read the goddamn folder?” he huffs. “Yeah, yeah, lotta people there. Witnesses galore, party in full swing.” He takes another swat at his Newtonian balls, a clear signal that my presence is no longer required. I stand.

“Time table?” I ask, and I know the answer—

“A day shorter than usual.” Stock reply. He thinks he’s being cute.

I try to make the next question sound casual, though it surely is not. “Pay?”

“Insurance company’s willing to fork over five grand and expenses. Company takes three grand, leaves two thousand bucks for you.”

I shrug. Seems standard to me, at least when it comes to the poverty-level wages most TruTel employees are forced to live on. “But I’ve got this problem with the pool in my backyard,” Teitelbaum continues, “and I need a little spare cash myself. Let’s say we split your commission, fifty-fifty.” He attempts to grin, a wide shark-toothed smile that ignites in me the most basic urge to leap across the desk and garrote him with the razor-thin wires of his Newtonian balls.

But what choice do I have? One grand’s better than nothing, and now with the Ohmsmeyer job busted like skeet, this might be my only chance to fight off foreclosure and eventual bankruptcy. A semblance of pride is in order. Elongating my neck as far as this guise will let it go, I hold my head aloft, clutch the manila folder to my breast, and strut out of the office.

“Don’t screw it up, Rubio,” he calls after me. “You wanna work again, you won’t do your usual half-assed job.”

A hard sprig of basil is between my teeth not twelve steps later, and already I’m putting that tyrant of a T-Rex behind me and feeling better about the assignment. Money in the bank, maybe a little respectability, and it won’t be long before the other PI firms are itching to contract some glamorous and expensive work out to Watson and Rubio Investigations. Yeah, I’m coming back. I’m on my way up. The Raptor is on a roll.

On my way out the front door, I shoot a congratulatory wink toward a temp receptionist taking down dictation in the vestibule. She recoils from my friendly gesture like a startled rattler and I halfway expect her to bare fangs and slither into a niche beneath her desk.

S
ix leaves of basil are busily working their special brand of magic through the hills and valleys of my metabolism, and that herbal chill is the only thing that’s keeping me from running off this crowded city bus with my hands waving wildly above my head like a chimpanzee. This is the first time I’ve ever been forced into any form of mass public transportation, and if the meager car-rental allowance Teitelbaum granted to this case will snag me anything nicer than a ’74 Pinto, it will be the last. I don’t know what died on this bus, but from the tidal wave of scents streaming toward me from the back three rows, I imagine that it was large, that it was ugly, and that it had eaten a good deal of curry in its waning moments of life.

The woman next to me has a strip of tin foil wrapped around her head like a sweatband, and though I don’t ask her what the foil is for—it’s a policy of mine never to question anyone who clearly has a constitutional right to insanity—she nevertheless feels the need to shout at me that her protective headgear keeps the “terrestrial insects” away from her “moist bits.” I nod vigorously and turn toward the window, hoping to squeeze my frame through any opening leading to the rational, outside world. But the window is closed. Locked up tight. A wad of pink chewing gum has hardened over the clasp, and I can almost make out the bacteria dancing on the surface, daring me to try my luck and pluck the rigid mess from its place.

But the basil is coming on stronger now, mellowing the scene, and I lean back against the hard vinyl bus bench, hoping to drown out the cacophony of coughs, of sneezes, of endless rants against society and those damn terrestrial insects. My arms drop away from their protective cross across my chest and fall easily to my sides; I can feel a slight grin tugging at the corners of my lips. Smooth.

I don’t know how he did it, but Ernie was a regular supporter of public transportation. That’s right—every week, usually on Thursday, at least once in the morning and once at night, my Carnotaur partner parked himself on a street bench and waited for the number 409 to show up and ferry him to and from our office on the west side.

“Keeps you in touch with the people,” Ernie used to say to me. “In touch with the good folk.” And whereas there is not one good folk on this bus I’d be interested in touching, I believe that he believed. I always believed that he believed.

Ernie.

The last time I saw Ernest J. Watson, PI, was the morning of January the eighth, nearly ten months ago. He was walking out the door, and I was doing my best to ignore his exit. We’d just finished up a particularly petty argument—typical nonsense, the kind of tiffs we’d get into three, four times a week, like an old couple spatting over the husband’s tendency to chew his ice, or how the wife babbles endlessly about nothing—that sort of married, been-around-the-block kind of crap.

“I’ll call you when I get back from New York,” he said to me just before he stepped past the threshold to our office, and I grunted in response. That was it—a grunt. The last thing Ernie ever heard from me was an “eh,” and it’s only my daily herbal intake that keeps that nagging thought safely on the edges of my brain.

It was a case, of course, that demanded his attention, and here I should say it was a case like any other, but it wasn’t. It was big. T-Rex big. Correction: It was Carnotaur big.

Raymond McBride—Carnotaur, connoisseur of human female companionship, and grand exalted mogul of the McBride Corporation, a financial conglomerate specializing in stocks, bonds, mergers, acquisitions, and pretty much any venture that brought in cash by the boatload—had been murdered in his Wall Street office on Christmas Eve, and the dino community was in more of an uproar than usual.

Due to some slipshod investigation by the crack team of forensic docs sent to the scene, it was still undetermined as to whether McBride had been killed by a human or by a fellow dino, so the National Council—a representative conglomeration of the 118 regional councils—took it upon themselves to send in a team of investigators from across the country to do some preliminary work on the case. Dino-on-dino murder will always bring up a Council investigation, no matter the circumstances, and it was imperative that the Council learn, as quickly as possible, which species had committed the crime and, more important, against whom they could levy some massive fines. The Council is always on the lookout to make a quick buck.

“They’re offering ten grand to every private dick that takes the case,” Ernie told me one Friday morning just after New Year’s Day. “Council wants this one wrapped up fast, bigwig like McBride. Wanna know if it’s a human who offed him.”

I shrugged and waved the suggestion away. “Dino killed him,” I said. “No mammal’s got the guts to take out a guy rich as that.”

Ernie grinned at me then—that stiff-lipped grimace that widened his face by a good three inches—and said, “No such thing as killing a rich man, Vincent. Everybody’s poor when they’re under the claw.”

So Ernie left, I grunted, and three days later he was dead. A traffic accident, they told me. A runaway taxicab, they told me. A hit-and-run and that was the end of that, they told me. I didn’t believe a word of it.

I flew to New York the next morning with a brown suitcase full of clothes and another full of basil. I remember very little of the trip. Here are the images that have seen fit to fight their way through a memory shot through with gaping holes of basil blackouts:

A county coroner, the one who worked on both McBride and Ernie, suddenly missing in action. On vacation somewhere in the South Pacific. An assistant, a human, who was neither helpful nor cooperative. A fistfight. Blood, perhaps. Security guards.

A bar. Cilantro. A female, maybe a Diplodocus. A motel room, dank and foul.

A police officer, one of the many detectives who investigated the supposed hit-and-run that took Ernie’s life, refusing to answer my questions. Refusing to allow me into his house at three o’clock in the
morning. His children, crying. A fistfight. Blood, perhaps. The back of a patrol car.

Another bar. Oregano. Another female, definitely Iguanodon. A motel room, still dank, still foul.

A bank debit card linked to one of the many accounts held by the Southern California Council, in my possession because I was at that time the Velociraptor representative and a member in good standing of the most bureaucratic and hypocritical board of dinosaurs the world has seen since Oliver Cromwell and his cronies—Brontosaurs, to the last—ran rampant through the coffers of the British Empire. A covert withdrawal in the amount of a thousand dollars. Another in the amount of ten thousand. Bribes, in the hope that someone—anyone—would give me a clue about McBride, about Ernie, about their lives and their deaths. More bribes to cover up the first bribes. Useless answers that brought me nothing. Anger. A fistfight. Blood, perhaps. A swarm of police officers.

A judge and a hearing and a dismissal. A plane ticket back to Los Angeles and an armed escort to ensure my departure from the Tri-State area.

Somehow, the Council learned of my creative accounting regarding their bank account and the sizable withdrawals—it wasn’t like I was in any state of mind to properly cover it up—and took a vote to boot me off the board. To
rectify
the situation, as the official term goes, and with a single unanimous “Aye” from the Southern California Council members, I had my social standing stripped away from me in the same week as my sobriety, my spotless criminal record, and my best friend. That was the end of my investigation, and the end of my life as a well-heeled, middle-class private investigator working the streets of suburban LA.